


Somnambulists

by Clocketpatch



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, F/M, Gallifrey, Gen, Origin Story, Other, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-04 05:48:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 15,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1077275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clocketpatch/pseuds/Clocketpatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We live to survive our paradoxes" - The Tragically Hip</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One: The Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived. - Oscar Wilde

  
Dust choked the Academy.   
  
Hoards of nano-robots kept the arched umber walls and geometric floors shined and repaired to sterile newness. No shadows lurked between doorframes or beside corners. It was a clean place, a bright place, which moved with succinct order and precision, and the dust, The Dust! thrived in the sweet glowing halls and classrooms.   
  
Invisible. Pervasive. Cloying.   
  
Students travelled from class to lecture to leisure in measured steps to the tick of a shared internal clock. The rhythm unaltered for millennia: A culmination of lives and ash washed together to same dead end. Grey-robed grim tumbling down the corridors of eternity. All waiting. All ready to end. Because someone had pierced the veil.  
  
There was a boy. He wore regulation student robes over his regulation child body; grey on dark leanness. He did not attend class or leisure, but spent his time in the in-between.  
  
He had been a student at the grand and noble Prydonian Academy for over a century. A child pacing a blinding-bright womb, following the beat with eyes closed to the moth-flame, adding his dreams to the dust — but then, as the decades blended, his dreams, among the millions, rose from their discard to haunt him. A chilly phoenix rising from the grave to find…. What?   
  
He didn’t remember them, not at first, but when he woke from his rest periods he shivered with warmth and ached for knowledge. He tried to satisfy the need by studying harder — more, more, more — pounding himself dry with facts and figures until his thoughts twisted into numbers and he couldn’t think without computing his ideas into sums.  
  
But the dreams, the greedy red-rimmed fire birds, remained thirsty.  
  
To them if ten thousand individuals all knew the same facts and figures, then the full ten thousand of them knew nothing at all. It was all dust on a parched throat. Like trying to squeeze water from stones. They demanded newness. The boy didn’t know what the word meant; He remembered little beyond the twist of the Academy corridor, the giant figure-eight path that followed the stamp of the school’s founder.  
  
Once there was a cliff, he thought, and a house built into it; a truly (physically) dark and dusty place where he spent his infancy. Once there were strings and a shuttle, vials, and soft encompassing warmth, but those memories were vaguer than ghosts and his thirst rejected them. What he needed would not be found in the past, but lurked somewhere in the mysterious ahead.  
  
He started, without realising it, to falter off course.  
  
His final exam approached as his studying slacked. He ran away one day to see the city that lay outside the school’s gates, the marvels of the Capital, the wonders of the Citadel Dome, but it was dustier still and the dreams did not stop. They tore at him. He started remembering fragments:  
  
Here a tree (though he knew not what a tree was), there a strained face soaked with sweat and red, and sometimes a butterfly, as elusive in its meaning as the tree. And other fragments, too many to name: A knight, a quest. Figures and heroes from his own culture’s legends brought to life beside others so foreign that he hesitated to believe his own mind might have conjured them. He saw himself sometimes, but not as he was, and those apparitions were the most elusive of all.  
  
He snuck out of the Citadel itself into _outside_ , the land of the savages — he had been taught — hoping they could quench the dreams with their wild ways. But, again, he found only dust. This time material; blowing on the wind of his dead world; taunting him with all its promises turned to ash. He returned to the academy halls dejected.  
  
He failed his exam.  
  
And immediately the dreams, as if assuaged by failure, ceased. He forgot them and applied to retake his exam. As a failure he was in shame. All his hope to remain high in the beat rested on the outcome of this test. There would be no third chance.  
  
Yet he did not go back to class. He remained in the ether, floating, chasing the wraith that drove him before, lusting after the knowledge it augured.  
  
He wandered the in-between lost in his mind, calculations, and smoke. His difference was invisible to most; so caught were they in the dance that they assumed no one might ever miss-step. Friends did not exist, family was a myth. There was no one to pull the boy back from the cliff’s edge. But a few noticed:  
  
His trip to the surface had not gone un-regarded. Silent alarms were set off by his (he thought) seamless escape. Certain people were notified, back and back. Not everyone played on the dance floor. The beat did not stay unchanging by itself. The boy had miss-stepped onto the wrong toes.  
  
He was watched.


	2. Summons

  
The boy wandered.   
  
He, as with all of his people, required little rest, and his route around the swing of the back-flowing figure-eight begged little effort. The floor was without slope, or slip, or obstacle, and the unchanging scenery did little to stress his mind.   
  
His final exam would be arriving soon. Not something to think about. The probability of his failure was absolute. He had attended class only in the most sporadic fashion over the past decade. He was surprised he hadn’t been kicked out of the Academy for his insolence, but then he had never heard of anyone being asked to leave —   
  
Expulsion was rare, it meant an abrupt change in the rhythm: Something to be avoided at all costs — but he knew he was unlike anyone else. His dreams were gone, but their rumour still compelled him. He was marked and uncertain.  
  
He was not like everyone else, and for that he was glad.   
  
And miserable.  
  
His feet tapped on the triangle-square tile of the floor, shapes blending into shapes, and he reflected that his rebellion against routine was gaining a routine of its own, more set than the one he had turned his back on: wander, ingest a food pill every fifty rounds, and what else? but nothing. His dreams were dust and he was a clockwork man following a circle to destruction. Round and round to the end.  
  
He would have hated his life had he known what hate was, but there was no emotion here, no change, nothing…  
  
Except —  
  
Time is relative, and the boy had been wandering too long to keep track of the days — not that the rise and fall of the sun had any bearing on his insulated indoor world. One moment everything was the same; time was an absolute continuum and he had been wandering as he always had and always would.   
  
That was the moment. That was the sameness that lasted forever.   
  
The next moment, turning over in an instant, a shadow fell across the boy’s set path, darkening the elusive patterns of the floor, and changing everything. Possibilities danced and Time shifted her course to accommodate the newness. The shadow was, to the eye, normal, but it flickered with promise.   
  
It was different from the shadows cast by the students stalking left and right along the hall to class. It was different, and the boy stopped without realising he had stopped, and the shadow stopped with him. It repositioned so that its bearer stood before him.  
  
One moment everything was the same, the next all had changed; Had always been changed.  
  
“Greetings.”  
  
The voice came rumbling like a vent regular, but somehow melodic. The boy shook to hear it, for it confirmed his suspicions about the shadow and sent a shiver through him that was visible through his robes. The voice was _new_.   
  
In his life at the Academy, the boy had heard the same voices repeated over and over. Guests were forbidden and new students coming into the academy were admitted in waves every five decades. New professors were uncommon enough that any change to the Academy’s staff was, literally, a historic event.  
  
The new voice belonged to neither teacher nor student. The boy raised his head slowly to find that the speaker of the voice was not some new dream phantom come to torment him but a physical being:  
  
A tall man encased in grey robes, like a student, but the style was radically different. He had no crown of authority like the professors, but wore a russet sash studded with six bronze half-orbs. His slicked yellow hair, crinkled brown eyes, and impressively long nose informed the boy that, not only was the stranger beyond his first body, but he was not following any of the registered templates. That was a mark of high rank, but the boy’s eyes came again to the stranger’s bare head.  
  
“Do you hold your tongue from fear or confusion?” the Stranger rumbled.  
  
The boy said nothing, wondering if his quietness would be taken for respect or insult.  
  
“Very well, but know that you have been watched now for a long while. Are you aware of the concept of consequence?”  
  
“Of course I am aware,” the boy snapped, uttering his first words in three years, “It’s half of what I am taught in this place.”  
  
“I do not think you are taught much at all in this place,” said the Stranger.  
  
To that remark the boy stood silent and chastised, but, behind the shame-faced repentance, his brain churned to find an answer to the stranger’s existence. All it found was dusty facts and figures, and images from the faded dreams that had led him off-course.  
  
And fear, because the few fitting thoughts he could stumble upon all ended with that rare rhythm-breaking expulsion. He desired change more than anything; but not that way. He wished to be different; not pariah.  
  
“You need not fear me,” said the Stranger, “Only follow. You are wanted.”  
  
“To stand trial?” the boy asked. He felt woozy. Things were too quickly sliding out of place.  
  
“No, only to be observed,” the Stranger said, “And perhaps…” He then turned and walked a few steps before saying, without looking back; “There is no cup which can fill your thirst, but the source stream perhaps may try.”   
  
The cryptic words willed the boy’s dreams forward. They had been peeking at his mind since the Stranger’s first appearance. Now they burst into flight following in the Stranger’s footstep before consciousness could break through to catch them. The boy knew not where he was going; only where it might lead.  
  
  
  
  
  
tbc


	3. Between the Toes of Giants

  
  
It is confusing to be a child in a place of adults, more confusing still when those adults are of the high up sort; the kind that believe themselves better than everyone (especially gape-mouthed students). So it was that the boy was only able to pull impressions from the clandestine gathering he was ushered into: the colour of the walls (silvery and white), the light smell of chlorine rising off the maze of geometric ponds the Stranger led him between to get there.  
  
He caught little of the actual discussion. He was too busy appeasing his thirst for the new. He did realise the oddness of his situation; that something very special was happening. And thought, perhaps, he should be afraid, but no emotions would form in his mind beside pure wonder. He trembled with it.  
  
The gathering was set with eleven individuals all dressed in the same student tones, the Stranger drawing the boy into their midst brought the numbers to unlucky thirteen. All were male. One stood behind a pedestal, and was the only one of their number to wear a crown. It was shaped to look like a golden halo, but the effort was somewhat ruined by the wearer’s deeply sloped forehead.  
  
“Is this the one?” the Crowned One asked.  
  
The boy opened his mouth to answer or ask, but the question was not directed at him.   
  
“Four-one-five-two-oh-one-five-one-eight,” the Stranger rattled off.  
  
“Alarm breach section two-nine-four,” another said, the boy didn’t know which.   
  
He had fixed his thin attention on the Crowned One and the Stranger who had guided him in. They were his hooks; everyone else was just a crowd voice, their identity easily lost in confusion and conformity and trembles. The boy thought that he was on trial. That the Stranger had deceived him. That he would be expelled. He shrank into his robes with fear.  
  
“He’s only a student,” said another Crowd Voice, “We can’t legally use him.”  
  
“Since when did we care about laws?” asked the Stranger.  
  
“But he is bold as we planned,” said a Crowd Voice.  
  
“It’s for the good of us all.”  
  
“He’ll never pass.”  
  
Muttering. Heated argument.  
  
“And you talk about legal responsibilities?”  
  
The boy fidgeted, his dreams scared away. He was being discussed and all he could catch were snatches. Fragments with confusing and freighting connotations. The arguing went on, and he was lost, adrift. He looked at the Stranger guide who had lured him there for consolation, but met only blank eyes and a quarrelling mouth.   
  
“What about me?” the boy asked/whispered/shouted, or perhaps only thought, “Don’t you care what I think? Won’t you explain what you say?”  
  
But they wouldn’t listen. He was ignored, as children often are, even when they are the subject of the conversation.  
  
It went on, and the boy felt the long passage of time move in his gut until, at the end:  
  
“Send him back,” said the Crowned One, and the boy felt a shriek of pain slide down his hopes, “Send him back and see if he passes. We are not above the law and we cannot send a student. But he is the one. His eyes have the same gaze.”  
  
 _The same as who?_ The boy puzzled, but his question was never voiced or answered. Almost as soon as he thought it he began to feel tired in a way he never had before. All of the eyes in the room fixed on him stony and powerful. His dreams called at him to fight the creeping numb, but it was comfortable after so much excitement. The eyes spoke to him of dreamless sleep. He let himself slip, and lost himself in the fall.  
  
TBC


	4. The Test

  
  
The thing next the boy knew he was in an examination pod hooked up to the final test for the second time in his life. He had no concept of waking. He did not remember the confusing meeting. One moment he was wandering the corridors, the next —  
  
The examination was underway.  
  
There was no time to think about anything else. It hurt, the way the pod sucked knowledge, greedy as the dreams but in a different way. This machine ate dust. Pumped you with it and then clawed it out of your mind with two thin wires.  
  
You were supposed to think over your learnings as the pod pulled it them out, but the boy didn’t have the answers in his mind to be extracted. He hadn’t studied. The pod sucked at his bare brain tissue and he screamed, as he had screamed during his first attempt at the exam. Then he had been retrieved to meet his verdict of failure, but this time no rescue came. He was left to the sucking wires grabbing at what was not there; consuming him.  
  
He thought, barely, before it was snatched away, that the pod must be broken. That his session would never end and the machine would eat his mind and soul to leave him an empty shell. Already he could feel, in a buzz of agony, memories being pulled from his skull to satisfy the machine’s devil appetite. Dust being pumped in to fill them.  
  
Dust for dreams. Pain. Going to die, going to die, going to —  
  
He steeled himself against the darkness. Students had only one life and one chance. Complete the exam or face death. Perhaps this was his punishment for failing twice.  
  
Then everything changed. Moment by moment, one forever exchanged itself for another.  
  
His mind flooded with all the proper equations. He was pushed to the wall of his brain as the correct answers crowded inexplicably in: the universal equations and the paradigm of time. The machine took them, examined them, put them back, and left the rest of his psyche alone.  
  
It was a boon to be sure. With this unnatural help the boy would pass the exam no problem. He would gain his lives.  
  
He would —  
  
Bad.   
  
_Cheating_ , said his dreams from where they had been crammed and pressed, _wrong_ , and a vague half-felt memory, a flash of silvery wall the same colour as the inside of the pod. An image of himself, screaming, fleeing, caught and punished. Running, always running from _this_.  
  
Future, past, now.   
  
The boy knew that his mind was being invaded and, whatever end or benefit he might receive, he hated it. Had to hate it.  
  
He wasn’t in control anymore. Perhaps never had been, but he would not be manipulated.  
  
With brute metal force he pushed the cheating out, though it hurt him terribly to do so. When it was done he sat slack in his harness. The exam finished. His brain jelly. The door to the pod creaked open and he was helped out. A fresh printed sheet was pressed into his hand. He could smell the ink and hot plastic. He brought the soft sheet to his blurred eyes and read:  


  
_415201518 Attempt Two:_

_fifty-one percent_

__** Pass **   


  
  
Then fainted into the arms of a worried teacher-attendant.  
  
  
  
tbc


	5. Thieves in the Dark

  
Not much came of it.  
  
All the members of his class had already taken their finals, passed or failed (he was the only one of the latter group to have asked for a second chance), and gone off. There was no graduation ceremony for the boy who got fifty-one percent on the second attempt. He was quietly ushered out of the school a few days past Otherstide and placed in a dull career in the Capital that matched his sallow marks:  
  
Scrap Attendant.  
  
He had no say in the matter. It was a disgraceful job for an Academy student; any plebeian city low-born could have filled it, but the boy did not complain. He liked the long hours and isolation. The workless work.  
  
All he needed to do was sit by the locked scrap room door with a stunner in hand to shoot any thieving Shobagons sneaking into the city from the wilderness. It was a duty considered too low for the capital guards. Useless. Make work for the poor in mind.  
  
He sat, gun in lap, for years, for decades, for a century and a half. His dreams died and he became more a statue than man. Dust accumulated between the creases of his dry red slacks and jacket (no robes for this profession; only common dress and uncommon distain).  
  
Sometimes he wondered what would happen if a Shobagon actually came threatening his post. He remembered the time in his youth (he was still young) when he snuck out of the academy to meet those savages only to find gusting dust stained red by a billowing sun. He wondered if he would be able to speak to such a savage should one come thieving to his door. If he might engage conversation before his gun.  
  
It never happened, the scrap room and its useless content were tucked too far into the city’s obscure turns, but something else did occur:   
  
One day, as he sat duty outside the door, a stranger in grey robes walked by. This was odd (the scrap room lay far from normal routes in the midst of a cul-de-sac bend) but odder still since the stranger cast a package in the boy’s direction and then continued without turning him a glance.  
  
Or perhaps he didn’t cast it.  
  
On second thought it seemed to the boy that the stranger had dropped the small cloth-bound bundle by accident rather than purpose. Yes, that was it; it had fallen from the man’s robes. He hadn’t noticed. Best to pick it up and return it to him, or, better, shout:  
  
“Sir! Sir!”  
  
But the twirl of grey robes and sharp sloped face of the stranger had vanished. The boy lifted himself from his chair and chased the memory of the presence for several moments down bright winding roads. Walled and roofed in white.  
  
Nothing.  
  
He returned to his duty with the package (weightless, finger sized, and round) in hand. He turned it back and forth between thumb and knuckle wondering at its contents and way-ward owner. When he looked up the door of the scrap room gaped open. Its digital lock smashed and unwinding red wires stark against the white.  
  
The boy would have cursed if he knew how. Instead he yelped and gripped the package into a fist tight enough to feel through the layers of cloth wrapping to the indistinct shape inside. He had been duped: The savages had come, must have, and lured him politely away from his post. He would have to go inside and use his gun (it rode heavy in its holster), no time for talk before blasting. No luck for hope.  
  
He passed the threshold into the dark.  
  
That struck him first. The darkness of the room.   
  
The lighting system must have been disabled by the thieves, and he who had never known a lack of illumination (the lights in the Academy and the Citadel ran without stopping whatever the behaviour of the outside sun) felt cut off. His other senses compensated as he adjusted to the murk: his ears hearing footsteps (imaginary?) thumping nearby, squeaks, a heartbeat (his own?), and his nose taking in a long reel of dusky sweet, like oranges left to rot. Had he known what oranges were.  
  
Bit by bit his vision came back and his other senses faded to their normal complacency.   
  
Piles and piles of jagged ripped edges rose before him. Here, in this maze of discard, the beat broke down and order was abandoned. Here things were chucked to die.  
  
The boy pulled out his gun and levelled it before him, waving it as a beacon as he started into the mess. His footsteps sounded loud against the floor grit. Once, in a fit of instinct terror, he fired his gun as a pile of junk collapsed; presumably knocked over by the thin breeze of his breath.   
  
The room stood fragile and ready to crumble at a whisper, yet still solid enough to rip a crease of pant leg when he passed too near a heap of discarded air vent blades. Something wet ran over his ankle and he did not stop to check if it was oil or blood.  
  
By and by he reached the wall at the end of the cavernous room. Bumped into it rather, and the line of tall, rust-bound capsules that ran across it; order, finally, in the chaos. He leaned there a moment, struggled to smooth his breathing and failed.   
  
A creak. A slam. And the glowing rectangle that he had used as a reference point while in the maze vanished. He was left alone behind a closed door. In the dark.  
  
No, not alone; with the robbers.  
  
He clutched his gun and the package (he was still holding it) tighter. His blood ran away to leave his hands white and flimsy. A noise in the gloom sent his heart skittering.  
  
He fired again, or tried, but the gun was not recharged from his last shot at the pile.  
  
The noise ceased, and remained ceased for a long time until the boy stood convinced he was alone. Lost with only his failure for comfort. He stood among the rubbish knowing that he hadn’t been put here to guard it, but because he was a part of it, because he was broken, different, and didn’t belong with the shiny, well-adjusted society of the inner Citadel. The air blew cold here in the dark, and he knew that he would always be alone.   
  
In his despair he chucked his gun into the maze causing a rumble-crash of landslides and a choking smog of dust. Then he sank down, not to cry, but to be one with sorrow. He lifted his hands (still clutching the package) to his face in a half-witted attempt to gouge out his eyes, and with them (he hoped) the pain.   
  
The plan came to nothing, and he withdrew his hands almost as soon as he brought them up:  
  
His bloodless fingers could not feel what his cheek instantly perceived: the package was warm. Hot, almost. He unwrapped it, fumbling with his numb digits and the dark, to find the object of his shame.  
  
It was small, innocuous; too innocent an item to hold so much intrigue:  
  
A key.  
  
A flat metal cone on a silver chain. Its dual planes engraved with the infinity symbol he remembered from the Academy’s hallways. It glowed, not noticeably, but enough to know it did, out of the corner of one’s eye, if you believed.   
  
It was connected to something.  
  
The boy’s dreams resurfaced from where they had survived in the shadows to find that something before his conscious mind realised what was happening:  
  
His arm, key in hand, reached out to one of the rust boxes guarding the climax wall. To its keyhole. To its secret place that made it slide open and he —  
  
  
  
tbc


	6. Drowning

  
  
…thrust in with a moan.  
  
*  
  
The boy didn’t know how to fly her. After he entered the door slid to seamlessness behind him. His attempts to reopen it set the central column moving. He clung to the console, convinced that his span was soon to end as the ship shuddered and jiggered her way to _someplace_.  
  
 _Elsewhere_  
  
His mind contracted on thousands of horrid possibilities of where his course might lead: into anomalies, stars, or courthouses. His face pallid and sweating. One moment he was/is/will be vertical; the next on his back tasting the acrid scream of a bit tongue. Shortly before/afterwards he blacked out.  
  
Eternity passes. The universe spins away to leave him trapped in a dimension of his own. It may be forever or never. One moment disappears to form another. A warm female voice bids him back to life.  
  
“Mother?”  
  
The child, newborn, woke to more terror. Stillness. Utter. Surrounded by the whiteness of his stolen craft (no, he was not a thief, he had not stolen this ship, _it_ had stolen him). Was this death?  
  
But the door was open, so he pulled himself to rightness and staggered out. Not noticing that his clothes had changed and his face with them.   
  
The first thing he saw was a tree. Beautiful and brilliant as his dreams: a conifer, soaring to the sky, its branches hanging lush with needles and scent. He ran to it, not knowing what it was, but amazed by its vast living presence after a lifetime of sterile halls, and fell to his knees in worships.   
  
Tears, a sensation he had never before felt, came to his eyes, and it was like dying and being born at the same time. It was new. It was good. It was hope.  
  
It was there, with his hands pressed deep into needle loam and his eyes moist with wonder that the alien found him, and, after the long-dark in the light, his life began.  
  
*  
  
Coolness surrounds you after the dive.  
  
Rise up with a sob, sucking the great depths into death to find peace — to find self, and, perhaps…  
  
Sky


	7. Part Two: Awake in the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get weird.

  
  
When Maggie found the man, she first thought he must be a demon; only a demon would step out of what appeared to be a solid boulder (a black giant stone tall as her head) and immediately fall to the ground howling. But, as the moments stretched on, she was forced to revise her opinion.  
  
Truly, the man’s wretched weeping could only belong to a tormented soul, and the words he spoke to the dirt between sobs wove soft lilting melodies around her ears. There was no deformity about his body, or horns pushing through his hair.   
  
If this was a demon it was surely a strange one, but she had heard that devils had many wiles. She took a step closer — but not too close least the maybe demon, maybe man transform into a serpent and devour her. All the while crossing her chest and uttering prayers for protection.  
  
He did not change, except to look more pathetic, and that was not a true change, but rather a noticing of details beyond the broad shapes of form and tear. A smear of blood stained the man’s calf, his face was pale as the clouds in the cheerful sky above were white, and the robes he wore were torn and speckled with dirt, blood, and pine needles. It was the robes that decided Maggie’s mind that the man must not be evil; They resembled the garb of a monk or pilgrim.   
  
Yes, that must be what he was.  
  
The memory of the man stepping from a rock faded from Maggie’s mind, as did the roar of wind that had summoned her in fright from her herb gathering. The story of the man’s identity rolled fresh cut into her head as if it had always been there:  
  
He was a pilgrim — the true kind, not a criminal doing penance — set upon by thieves and left to bleed here under the trees. He was not sobbing, as she had first thought, but rather praying to the Lord to forgive him his failure and grant him mercy in his helplessness.  
  
That confirmed. Maggie did what she thought she must, kneeling beside the holy man and hoping that he would not be offended by the aid of a woman, a dirty woman at that. Of ill-repute. A widow; a mid-wife.  
  
“Sir?”  
  
His only response was to call his lilting words louder. Maggie knew not what they were, but they sounded to her, almost, like the language church men used in service; the proud tongue of an empire succumbed to time. The man seemed not to notice her presence above his own fervour, so she placed a cautious hand on the small of his back. He shook under her touch and she speedily withdrew.  
  
“Sir?”  
  
At this second calling he looked up at her with his strange sun-less face, and the paleness she had first perceived grew larger until she could tell no other feature. He was white and pure as a lamb or angel. The red dirt specking his brow in comparison to the red blood she had often seen on crucifixes. His eyes —  
  
Blue and lost in themselves, seeming to see the whole of creation at a glance.  
  
Maggie bent her head in speedy aversion from their gaze.  
  
“I am sorry Sir. I did not know.”  
  
The man nodded, accepting her penance, and also the arm she offered to help him rise, unsteady, to his feet. Maggie lived not far down the dirt track she had found the man sprawled beside, but assisting his stumbling walk tripled the time of her journey home. It was a burden she bore gladly; for not often did one find themselves in the company of an angel.


	8. Beelzebub in the Light

  
The turf-walled hovel Maggie dwelled in was not her own, having lost her possessions and home in repayment of her late husband’s debts. She had been sent to the road to wander, to ply what trades she may, and survive where she could.  
  
She was an honest woman, and, whatever was whispered in the village square, had known no man but the one she had been joined to in sacred ceremony (though he had known many women).   
  
She earned her bread and shelter through the ancient trade of mid-wifery, honest, though much despised in her current age. The charges she reared in this hut were the whelps of a simple peasant who could barely afford his own mouth, let alone his four young children, or hers.  
  
Joseph, the oldest of the children at seven, was at work in the field with his father when Maggie arrived back at the hut with her angel. The three remaining children: Mary, Beth, and still cloth-bound Luke, were scattered across the dirt floor. Maggie ignored them. She held to the old rule that a child given an eye was a child spoiled. She did, however, give them a brief enough inspection to deduce all was well. None had died or rolled into the fire during absence, and for that she gave thanks.  
  
Immediately her attentions turned to her angel.  
  
His leg wound had clotted to his robe hem on the long walk from woods to warmth, and she gingerly tugged the cloth away to make sure it was free from pus and dirt. To her amazement the skin under the red-flower scab was pure. He allowed her to peel it away like a crust to reveal perfection underneath. She looked up at his dirt smeared face, and wide, searching eyes. He smiled, and she blushed with shame.  
  
She had been gathering herbs before she found him, and she laid those out now. He watched with great interest as she bound them into bundles to be dried or crushed or soaked according to purpose.  
  
“What is this for?” he asked.  
  
And she jumped to hear him speak. His voice was both smooth and hesitant, and beneath the words she could understand there lurked a whisper song that she couldn’t.  
  
“It’s for medicine, and tonics,” she said, keeping her eyes carefully turned from the angel’s holy face, “for any of the children if they get sick, Lord please forbid.”  
  
He seemed confused at that answer, but accepted it.  
  
“’Course you could heal them with a touch couldn’t you?” she said, “Perhaps even make it so that their mother never died…”  
  
She trailed off, embarrassed to have voiced her thoughts.  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
He did not answer and it was comforting silence. His eyes offered solace, and she, craving it, accepted.  
  
“I’d never poisoned her,” Maggie confessed, her voice low, “she just never stopped being pale after birthing. I made her brews with herbs and dribbled water into her mouth with a cloth but there was nothing I could do. The blood ran black and she was dead a half turn of the moon after. I shouldn’t be saying this to you. I’m sorry.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
She looked at him, his mouth pursed like a child’s as he struggled to comprehend the activities of Sinful Earth. She noticed that the children on the floor, down to cloth-bound Luke, were looking at him. Their faces seemed to glow with the sight.  
  
“She was ever a good woman,” Maggie said, “honest and well-standing beside her husband. Her sickness couldn’t have come of sin; so the villagers say it must have come from poison. Her husband thinks the same but has brought no plea forward. I’m the mid-wife. Who else would have slipped her venom?”  
  
“But I’m a good woman,” she said smally, “I know that misfortune comes only on the wicked, and I have seen many trials, but the saints also suffered much…”  
  
She crossed herself quickly as the man watched with the bafflement of a babe.  
  
“I am sorry.”   
  
She returned to her herb sorting without another word. The only sounds in the hovel being: breath, fire, and the slink of limp leaf on wood.   
  
It remained thus for many hours until the sun began to fall, struck from its perch by dusk. Twilight invaded into the gloom-light of the hovel with a reddening tinge, and John Tall, the peasant Maggie worked under, returned home with his oldest son in tow.  
  
Both were bent from planting, their threadbare garments stiff with sweat-made mud. Joseph collapsed onto the floor next to his siblings, silent and trembling. His father leaned awhile in the door.   
  
John Tall was a gnarled man long in face and limb. He gave generously out of his poverty to the Church, and was known as a kind and willing worker. Maggie reflected that there was no better man she knew to be graced by an angel’s presence than he and wondered if this heavenly visitation had been sent by John Tall’s departed wife. Perhaps the angel would proclaim Maggie’s innocence —  
  
She said nothing of her thoughts or deeds, but stood and ventured to the fire to put on porridge for the evening meal. She was in the midst of stirring it when John Tall noticed the alien presence in his home.  
  
“Who is this?” he asked in a voice that was not a shout by exhaustion’s grace only. Maggie dared not turn from her work to face him directly.  
  
“I found him,” she murmured, “along the road and brought him in.”  
  
“To rob us?” John asked.  
  
Maggie stirred furiously as the porridge thickened, her tough arms aching with the effort.  
  
“No sir, he was wounded, and the Lord teaches us to help those in need.”  
  
“Have you given him any food?” John asked.  
  
“No sir,” said Maggie.  
  
She heard a long release of air, a sigh, as John Tall the generous, who could barely feed his own family made a decision.  
  
“He looks not wounded to me,” he said.  
  
“He healed himself,” said Maggie, and left it at that. John’s look was quizzical, but quickly washed away by weariness.  
  
“Is he a beggar or a pilgrim?” he asked.  
  
“A pilgrim,” said Maggie.  
  
“Then we must feed him and let him quickly be on his way,” said John.  
  
Maggie ladled the stiff porridge into wooden bowls, giving up her own for the angel she had invited in. He did not eat until John did, and he seemed to choke as the thick brown slime went down. Maggie prayed silently that she would not be though ill-of by heaven for serving one of its angels such poor fare. She crouched next to baby Luke to feed him his cooled and watered version of the meal.  
  
“What is your name pilgrim?” asked John when he finished his bowl, and Maggie, as she scrapped the pot for any remaining sustenance, lifted her ears for the answer.  
  
The angel looked at John with pained eyes.  
  
“I don't know,” he said. And wept.   
  
tbc


	9. Difficult births

  
John did not force the pilgrim to leave. Perhaps he was moved by the tears and wretchedness, perhaps he had his own reasons, or maybe a trick was wrought in his mind to change his opinions as had happened to Maggie. He never told. But, when the man finished weeping and looked up with his track stained face, John said:  
  
“You must be weary, rest,” and pointed to his own straw pallet. The man fell to the sleeping place like one struck by a bow.  
  
He slept for many days. The spring planting finished, and John Tall turned his labour to repairing the walls of his Lord’s castle. Joseph with his two toddler sisters in tow worked with other children and women of the village to keep the fields weeded and free from robbers (both human and animal). Maggie was left alone with baby Luke and the unconscious man. No comment was made on his prolonged rest. He became a feature of the hovel. A convenient log for the youngest of the children to lean against.  
  
By the time two cycles of the moon had passed the man was forgotten. He still lay in the cottage, but a blankness shielded him. Eyes slid over his prostrate form and the children no longer snuggled against his coolness on the warm nights. Maggie collected her herbs and laid them to dry, prepared stiff porridge, tended her infant charge, and gave no heed to the angel she had brought in off the road. Only baby Luke continued to stare at the man. Eventually it was those innocent eyes that brought the man back.  
  
Life calling to life. The unsullied dreams of childhood releasing the phoenix. Longing to longing. Without warning moment gave way to moment and the man sat up after his long dormancy, and begged for his mother.  
  
Maggie jumped, and dropped her herbs, and crossed herself.  
  
“Angel!” she shouted. Trembled, and then fell into a strange calm.  
  
“Are you her?” he asked.  
  
“Goodness no,” she said, dropping to her knees to retrieve her fallen medicines from the packed dirt floor, and then said, quite casually; “Are you rested?”  
  
The man contemplated the question. Yawned. Stretched. He examined his teeth with his tongue and flexed his fingers until they cracked.  
  
“Yes, I think so.”  
  
“That is good.” Maggie hesitated. “I did not know that angels had mothers.”  
  
“What is a mother?” the man asked.  
  
Maggie didn’t know how to answer that question. “A mother is a mother,” she said, “They bring others into life with the help of a man. I’m a mid-wife. I help bring the child out and care for the mother — ” her voice stuck.  
  
“Making life must be difficult to need so much help,” the man said, filling the empty space.  
  
“Very difficult,” said Maggie, “it’s the price of the fruit; our pain, our sweat. Sometimes life demands life. It’s no one’s fault. Everything is ordained.”  
  
“It’s what happened to the little one’s mother,” said the man, looking at Luke, “he told me with his eyes.”  
  
Maggie nodded. She wondered if the tired angel had awoken to give her redemption. She wondered what it would be worth with only her and dumb Luke to hear it.  
  
“It must be difficult,” the man repeated, “ripping flesh out of flesh. I was woven together with threads. Much neater. Minimal consequence. But the power has gone out of it. All the wonder gone outside to die with the sun.”  
  
Then the man withdrew into himself, as if contemplating this fleshless method of creation. He is an angel, Maggie thought, created by holy hands. Woven with blessed skill she could not think to comprehend.   
  
He had not forgiven her, but he had imparted her with sacred knowledge of heaven. Her. Dirty woman that she was. She could never deserve such a thing.  
  
“Take it back.”  
  
But he did not.  
  
*  
  
John returned to the hovel at sundown, tired and covered with rock grim. The children came after him, wide-eyed and silent, to sit in their place by the fire. The waking of the man was taken in and accepted.  
  
“Are you rested?” asked John, as if greeting a friend just wakened from a brief slumber.  
  
“Yes,” said the man, “Thank you for your kindness. I am indebted beyond gratitude, but I must not take further advantage.” He moved towards the door, his footsteps quiet, his purpose clear. Luke began to cry.  
  
“No,” said John, and Maggie looked at him curiously. Luke’s wails dimmed to a strange pitch. A music between sobs and silence. The hovel waited expectant, and time stood at end working designs in the air.  
  
“It is dark,” said John as the moment turned over, “and thieves prowl the roads. You must spend the night.”  
  
The song ended. The hut was only a hut again. The sparkle disappeared from the air and John turned to Maggie who still stared with a dropped chin.  
  
“What are you looking at?” he asked. “Dull woman, put on porridge and make extra for my guest.”  
  
Maggie scuttled to the cauldron. Luke sniffed. His baby face ran sticky with mucus. The man bent to clean it with a corner of his robe.  
  
“Please don’t,” he said quietly, his stomach making a peculiar noise, “I’m still full from my last meal.”   
  
He receive odd looks for his comments, but it was accepted after a moment. Of course he wouldn't be hungry. Why would he be hungry? Though he had slept two months wihout substance, but that wasn't odd either. Somehow.  
  
The family ate. Luke gurgled, and life went on.  
  
  
tbc


	10. Bricks and Mortar

  
In the morning the man went to work with John. He was introduced to the other workers as Pilgrim. No one questioned his presence.   
  
The man, Pilgrim, was quiet and diligent. When rarely he did speak it was to give aid to the other men in their toil. He understood everything, and soon even the master mason gave him ear. At night he went back to the hovel. He drew John’s children out of their post-work lethargy with jokes, and handcrafted puppets, and strange tales of a young monk trapped in a dusty white castle that floated through the sky. He ate next to nothing and didn’t sleep. At night he went outside to stare at the heavens.   
  
Life settled into routine day by day. Pilgrim went to Mass with the family. They, as peasants, stood in the back. After the service Pilgrim had many questions for Maggie that the mid-wife could not answer. Sometimes, when night was quiet, and the soft folds of darkness compelled him, he would lie next to her for a time. But he would always leave her side by morning, least his presence bring her shame.  
  
Stone followed stone building up the walls of the lord’s castle. Pilgrim did not understand the work. The war stories told by the other workers confounded him. The rule exerted by the mysterious lord was equally confusing. When, rarely, the noble came out to supervise the work he looked to Pilgrim like just another man. The walls grew taller.   
  
Imposing. Eternal.  
  
Pilgrim could see the expertness of the craftsmanship. He saw how long the walls would stand. Hundreds and hundreds of years before crumbling back to the earth from whence they came. Even then they would leave trace remains. He saw men digging at the remains of the wall in a thousand years time trying to piece together its story. He saw oceans rise to cover them, and then recede, ice and fire, night and sun for eons in steady round. Good and right.  
  
But one part of the wall was different; its story didn’t stretch into forever. It broke, sending a system of thin cracks to slice the rest of the time web. It confused him, and one day, when the other men were resting in the shade of the works, he stood in front of the section squinting into time trying to figure it out. The stones there were no different than the others. He heard screams but couldn’t see their source.  
  
“Pilgrim.”  
  
A hand landed on his shoulder and he jumped slightly, sliding it off. It was John Tall, friend, but contact always made Pilgrim uneasy.  
  
“Apologises,” said John, “I should remember your giddiness.”  
  
They stood side by side. The sun sailed high above them beating treacherous heat, drying the morning mist that still clung in the gullies. Chatter came up from the women tending the nearby fields, and the tired laughter of children who repeated stories of sky castles as they bent to pluck weeds.  
  
“Does it tell you more stories?” asked John.  
  
Pilgrim squinted at the fresh chipped stone of the wall. Smooth to ward off attack, the top was not yet finished and rose jaggedly against the blue. Shadows grew between the close-packed rocks.  
  
“Nothing,” said Pilgrim.  
  
However hard he stared no moss would come to this section. No age would blunt its edges. Its top would remain forever undone.  
  
“We’ll put a top on it today,” said John, “and then back to the fields for the second planting.”  
  
“Yes,” said Pilgrim, and continued to gaze into time. He did not know why the wall made him uneasy. Why he could see these strange visions while the other men moved by without a clue? He wondered who he was and where he had come from. He was accepted among the men. He had a good life, but he knew it was a lie.  
  
And according to Maggie all lies must come with a price.


	11. Blood and Dust

  
  
The fragmented web of the unfinished wall gave him a headache and he wandered away. Not to where the other men were sitting, but to a place of his own outside the narrow band of shadows cast by the castle. The pure light of the sun glazed off his skin and the rough wool clothing John had gifted him. He had so many thoughts in his head. He thought that the stiff boards of his skull must burst or bend back with their volume.  
  
It was like a fire and river and he didn’t know how to stop it. Melting, flowing, shifting. The world danced around him to strange patterns that he could and could not see. But no one else knew they existed at all.  
  
They — Maggie, the men, John, John's children — called him Pilgrim, but that wasn’t his name. It was, perhaps, a description, but no; a pilgrim knew where they were going. They had a purpose: a pilgrimage. Did he have such a purpose?  
  
He didn’t know. There was something he had forgotten. It lay in the ever swirling mists at the back of his packed-to-aching head. He could smell the food of the other men; porridge and hard-ground bread. He could hear them chewing, and swallowing, and talking, and living. They were alive.  
  
He was...?   
  
Maybe Luke knew with his innocent child eyes. Maybe tucked into his soul was the answer. The Pilgrim loved and feared the babe because he signalled the apex of the Pilgrim’s difference with every smile and gurgle and dirtied cloth.   
  
Their food tasted foul to him. He remembered eating smooth, tasteless capsules once, like pebbles, but surely that was impossible? He remembered being old and young and living a thousand lives that had never happened. Sometimes he wondered if he were demon-possessed, but he was accepted in the church and the sight of a crucifix did not burn him. So much was impossible, and confusing. Break ended and he welcomed it, mingling back into the throng of men he belonged with.   
  
He could almost convince himself of that.  
  
“HEAVE!!!”  
  
Blind work took him easily, and he allowed it. He was stronger than the other men. He used this blessing to the good of others. He took on more than his fair share because he could bear it. He joined a pulley team bringing blocks of stone bricks to the top of the unfinished section and —  
  
“HEAVE!!!”  
  
The pulley had been his idea. The builders had been using a scaffolding system. But the pulley was faster, easier, and safer — there had been no injuries under Pilgrim’s watch. No limbs crushed beyond repair as hands slipped and blocks fell. The pulleys were specially anchored to prevent slippage, even if the entire team walked away and left a block dangling.   
  
“HEAVE!!!”  
  
He pulled to the rhythm. His blood rushed through his veins and it felt good. Comradeship. Hard work. Life well lived. There was sweat on his brow and dirt under his nails, and if he didn’t eat like the other men then at least he smelled like them. A moving man collected no dust. A rolling stone gathered no moss.  
  
And wasn’t that the problem? The massive basket of rocks dangled over his head, weighing him down. His life was a lie. Mass and Maggie had taught him that lying was wrong, that sins never went unpunished. The basket dangled. He had wrought this. His head burst with the knowledge and stars spun out of the blue, blue sky to preside over his trial.  
  
The wall would never grow moss, because, as he watched, the rope frayed. A mouse had chewed at it during their last break, but no one had noticed or thought to check.  
  
“HEAVE!!!”  
  
He could see all the time. The finale threads parting. The basket falling. Swinging as the other ropes still supporting it struggled at its weight alone. Bricks fell. Hurtling to leave dents in the ground. Men yelled, screamed, groaned in pain. Died. He saw the basket strike the wall. Once. Twice. Three times. The half-finished top crumbled.   
  
The dust rose up.  
  
“HEAVE!!!”  
  
The rope began to fray.  
  
He couldn’t stop it. Had to watch it happen. Let time play her cruel games.  
  
His fault.  
  
A brick struck his shoulder and he fell, adding his hollers to the uproar. Blood and rocks fell, and the dust laughed. It would always win.  
  
TBC


	12. Nothing Costless

  
  
There is a strange silence that falls immediately following disasters. It only lasts a moment before the screams and sobs over take it, but in some ways the noise is better. For Pilgrim the silence lasted forever:  
  
He spun though the dust, above it, and below. Queer shapes loomed out of the grey to leer and lay blame at his feet. He had invented the pulley. If not for him this ghostly moment would not exist. He was an error in time, and this was the payment.  
  
The consequence.  
  
He should have known, but he didn’t know why. If only he hadn’t skipped so many lessons. What lessons? He couldn’t remember. Should. Couldn’t.   
  
Killer.   
  
Gradually the weeping broke into his private hell. The dust cleared to gloat over its carnage. Pilgrim’s right shoulder felt cleaved to the bone. He was weak from the loss of blood and couldn’t use his arm. His forehead had been dented and every movement brought him to pain and spinning stars. Still, he lurched forward to dig out his buried comrades.  
  
He brought them out: one, two, more — there had been fifteen men working on the wall. At least half of those were buried. They were pulled out. Some barely injured, some near death, some already there. They were lined up in the rubble, and their moans spurred Pilgrim to continue looking for the one he had not yet found.  
  
John, friend.  
  
He found him, finally, crushed under a small mountain of stone. Pilgrim bent over him. Both of them were ghost-like white with stone dust. John’s back was bent over like wheat in the wind, but what was natural for wheat looked hideous on a man.  
  
“I can’t feel it,” John muttered.  
  
“It’s alright,” said Pilgrim, “you’re safe.”  
  
He couldn’t lift the pile of bricks trapping his friend. Others lent hands to help, but it was too late. Pilgrim had never understood the war stories told by the work crews. Death existed, but it was a mathematical formula, something to keep the world from becoming over-populated. Death was inevitable. It was a part of time. It was a concept.  
  
This was reality and it tore Pilgrim. He ripped at his hair; grown long and bleached white with dust. He bit his lip and made more blood well over his face. He didn’t feel the pain. His heart (hearts?) were aching too terribly. Beating strangely in his chest and reminding him of his role in this tragedy.  
  
Death happened. It was no one’s fault, said Maggie, it was pre-ordained. The Church said that death was the wages of sin. Pilgrim always thought that a steep price.  
  
And this death wasn’t ordained.  
  
That thought made him scream from his belly to his shaking teeth, to rent the smiling blue sky with his pain. Time should have carried on without this casualty. It was only the wound of his presence that made it. The spidery crack he had seen. If only he had realised then.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he said. Over and over. He was the bringer of death.   
  
The dreams rose. Red phoenixes and fire. Dead branches blazed across the horizon. Oceans boiled. Suns crumpled to black embers. The smell of rotted oranges, iron, and dust clung to the dry wind. A metal monster sent rays of killing light across the cosmos. He had always been the bringer of death. Everything he touched would turn to ash.  
  
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”  
  
He reached out to John’s lanky twisted form. To a body beyond reason gasping into nothing. He laid his good hand on the crushed spine. Felt the pain race down his own back.  
  
“I didn’t know. I tried to leave. Why did you make me stay?”  
  
He was unaware of the stares; the wonder-filled eyes of the other peasants as he drew John’s crumpled form into a straight line, as bruises and lines of blood vanished, only to reappear on his own skin.  
  
He thought only of guilt, of his sin, of John’s four young children and Maggie sent out to walk the dusty roads.  
  
He would not be the destroyer. That could not, must not, be his fate.  
  
The corpse stopped breathing, and then gasped its first breath as Pilgrim’s eyes dimmed. All he wanted was to heal his wrongs. Sometimes life took life, said Maggie. If that was the price he would pay it.  
  
John lived.  
  
And the Pilgrim died. 


	13. Part Three: A Time to Rest, A Time to Run

  
  
All living things have defence mechanisms. The reason for this is simple: survival of the fittest.  
  
Time is alive.  
  
Not in the traditional sense, and applying Darwin’s law to Time is a crude comparison, but given our poor understanding of the universe comparisons are all we have. Time exists to live like any other creature real or ethereal. For our sake she must survive; because the death of one can effect the lives of many. Destroy one species and the habitat it is a part of will crumble; Food chains and symbiotic relationships will collapse — and in Time’s case that means the multiverse.  
  
Long ago and far away in a reality that perhaps no longer exists thirteen men sat in a mirrored room watching the rest of their universe. They thought they understood Time.  
  
But they only saw her as an element; a thing that could be manipulated with care and scientific theory. The difference, you see, between elements and animals is predictability:  
  
Time is not an animal (but again we come to comparisons) but when injured she reacts. She has antibodies to deal with mild infections; the Reapers and the Vortesaurs which live inside her body (the vortex is her inside, the multiverse is her skin, but also her inside; it’s very simple don’t you see?).   
  
Sometimes, however, the harm coming to her requires more than automatic response. The thirteen men did not know what they were doing, but they knew enough to avoid triggering Time’s immune systems. They ran around her defence mechanisms, disguising their 'slight adjustments' (more a botched plastic surgery than a haircut) with paradox and genetic coding. In response Time neutralised the threat in different ways; calling on her sisters Pain and Death to help her blot out the anomaly before its cracks could spread. She tried to be subtle. She tried to be kind. But the thirteen men would not stop their torments.   
  
No living thing has infinite patience, and she with control over all moments and possibilities grows eventually/instantly weary of repetition.  
  
She gives the men one more chance.  
  
*  
  
The tall man with a sloped brow and a crown pauses the screen. He has not aged in the intervening century and a half. None of the men in the room have. They stand unspeaking in the chamber. The sound of twenty-six pounding hearts patters off the mirror walls, a reflection of the inner selves they try so hard to hide.  
  
The sound is all but inaudible; but their senses are enhanced. They give no outer sign of panic. Their breathing is calm, they do not twitch or tense muscles, and in the passing moments the soft, reflecting drum beat slows.  
  
“Another failure,” says the Crowned One.  
  
The image on the screen is of the fallen Pilgrim. He looks very different from the boy who was carried from this mirrored room to a specially prepared examination pod nearly two hundred years ago, less well-groomed. He is filthy; white dust, black mud, and blood.  
  
He is dead.  
  
Beneath him stirs a primitive alien. The human John Tall the boy has been living with for months. He should be dead. His spine was snapped, his ribcage crushed — but now those injuries have transferred to the boy. This is not the first time. Time is always finding new and creative ways to dispense with their meddling.  
  
The boy, for some inexplicable reason, triggered regeneration and passed the energy into the dying human.  
  
The Crowned One scowls and sharply twists a dial. The image flickers back into the silvery wall. The drum roll increases.  
  
“We have another looming ready,” said one of the uncrowned men, “and we’re starting to see results in the mission...”  
  
The Crowned One nodded, slowly, his high collar impeding the motion. The human female was pregnant. Whether the offspring would live or fall through the cracks to be eliminated by Time was yet to be determined. They had lost so many…  
  
“How many viable?” the Crowned One asked.  
  
Twelve men shifted and stirred. The one who knew — the one whose daily identity brought him close to the genetic reproduction centre — smiled; if it could be called that. These were not men used to expressing emotion.  
  
“Five hybrids still viable in the loom,” the man said, and the almost smile spread to the Crowned One.  
  
 _Five_ , when only one had survived each time for the past thirty attempts, and a natural hybrid being loomed in the human female; perhaps there was some hope…  
  
The Crowned One’s almost smile fell when he remembered the reason for their mission. That thing their ancestors had seen in the looking-glass all those millennia ago. Beyond the veil; that stirring, spinning pattern of destiny that they _would_ thwart.  
  
“That is good,” said the Crowned One, “that is very good.” 


	14. Family Gathering

  
  
The Master Loomist walked through the birthing lab. A thousand strands of being and possibility swirled after him. Tubes and vials, shuttles and thread. Little voices, only gurgles at this stage, unintelligible to all but the most sympathetic of ears. Little eyes that weren’t eyes peeking out of the chemical weave. This was where life and time were woven for the future. Where the CIA conducted its secret million year mission towards survival; and they would not fail again.  
  
*  
  
The Pilgrim died. It was a strange sensation, and, he reflected as he fell, a familiar one. A million glittering prisms studded his vision. Confusion and dust bit at the edges, and it was very much like life until all the mirrors snapped together to give him something life never could —  
  
“Mother?”  
  
The woman hung suspended from nothing. Her face was very like and unlike Maggie’s; stern and kind, but fearless and unscarred by life. Sad and happy, and a laugh fell from her lips.  
  
“Maybe.”  
  
She was wrapped in white silk. Stars danced at her fingertips. Galaxies spun beneath her feet, and stalled, and vanished to form again.  
  
“Do you know what you are?” she asked.  
  
And he knew, for the first time in his life (death?) he knew, and was ashamed. So embarrassed, because he knew, and she knew, and it wasn’t his fault, but it was. He wished for dirt to burrow into, a blanket to cover his head with, an endless white Academy corridor to retreat into.  
  
Dust had to be better than shame.  
  
“You are presumption.”  
  
The Pilgrim fell to his knees. Burning from the inside out and the outside in. Anomaly, wrongness, reckless audacity — she liked that last trait, but it needed to be tamed. Could he be tamed? Could he stand it?   
  
“Please,” he begged with a cracking voice and weary hearts, “don’t make me live again.”  
  
“I have had no say in your creation or existence,” the woman said, “I can only control the damage wrought by ignorance. I can only be kind, but for how long?”  
  
“Please…” the Pilgrim begged.  
  
The woman floated closer to his wretched form. She had no eyes; instead twin vortexes of eternity sat in her ice pale face. Maybe-lands the Pilgrim could lose himself in. Maybe-lands of past and future with the woman’s body forming the present.  
  
She was pregnant the Pilgrim noticed, knew.  
  
She bent down to stroke his weeping face, tender, like any mother to a child crying over a scraped knee or lost pet. And her eyes that were not eyes were so sad.  
  
“They are evil,” she said, “out of fear they are evil, and out of survival they orchestrate their own demise. I try to keep the irony at bay. I try to give them years longer. But they will not listen to their mother. Will you?”  
  
 _“Will you kill for me?”_  
  
“I don’t want to be a destroyer,” wept the boy. Crystal tears fell and were consumed by the void. His dreams were beside him, whispering truths that he could not bear to hear. Somewhere he saw John rising out of the dust to live and to raise not only his own children, but also the poor bastard alien son he had unknowingly created.  
  
Such pain. Was that always the consequence of ignorance? But knowledge without wisdom was what had brought him here. Would ignorance have been better?  
  
Strange beings of hate, concealed in shells of hate, they were killing, killing, killing… Planets were burning. Lives were burning.  
  
His strange hybrid son’s son’s son’s son’s son… it went on. Infiltrating.  
  
That was his purpose.  
  
“They only wanted to survive,” the boy said.  
  
“They will,” said the woman, Time herself. “You have been seeding that race for a million years. They are more like you than unlike you in all the best and worst ways.”  
  
 _“But they will never recognise you as their parent.”_  
  
 _“And your own race will never see you as their son.”_  
  
Time ruffled his hair and fussed over his sores. She brought him tea, and cookies, and milk, and unthinkable choices. Pain beyond measure. A scale. A pair of measures. A balance.  
  
A sword in a stone.  
  
“I can’t,” the boy said, “I don’t want this burden.”   
  
“You don’t have to bear it,” Time said. “Another soul can be arranged. There have been others…”  
  
“What would be the consequences?” the boy asked, learning at last.  
  
The man John Tall died beneath a collapsing wall.  
  
A boy graduated from the Academy with 97% and did very many exciting things. He became a scientist. A member of the High Council. The President of the most powerful race in the universe. He could do anything.  
  
But the man, John Tall, died, and another soul was forced to suffer through the CIA’s missions; to become a tool for the dust. The boy remembered his exam and the greedy suction. He remembered the answers which swelled to fit his head. So easy to give in…  
  
“Don’t..." he whispered to his future, his past, his maybe. "There’s so much…”  
  
Time smiled and vanished, leaving the Pilgrim to find his own way through the black.


	15. Bargain

  
  
The boy lived in a house perched half-way up the side of a mountain and he spent many happy days scampering over those auburn slopes not knowing, not caring that all of his freedom would soon be wiped away.  
  
Auburn slopes and languid plateaus. Wilderness that was harsh and beautiful with a view across the desert to the far off citadel (in more than space). A diamond planted in the rough. Red light bounced off its facets from the giant sun which had slowly been consuming the sky for millennia, held in check past reason by temporal shielding and technology.   
  
He didn’t care about that, the boy; he was free to live and dance and sing. Free to choose this or that; to disobey his cousins and explore, and still be welcomed home to dinner.  
  
Free to runaway from bath time if he felt like it. To pout, whine, or jump for joy. To feel joy.  
  
To feel.  
  
Dream.  
  
Though they couldn’t know that.  
  
“The Academy,” he heard his cousin whisper one day as he slunk and eavesdropped (play-spied) through the wise-dim halls of his home. The word cut his soul; paring out a piece of carefree bohemia. He was seven years old. The days were against him, and all the dark demons were rushing up again. Tick and the clock, and the tides, and the slow expansion of the sun.  
  
Walls and death and fire birds. He was older than he pretended to be. He could pretend: that was freedom. To go to the Academy — that was the plan, rules, things he must break or be consumed. He would forget, she had told him that.  
  
That was the deal. He would get one chance to choose his path and one chance only. Out of the dark and into the night. Sleeping or awake. After that there would be no freedom. Only time and fate, because he had already choosen in a way. Or had the choice made for him.  
  
Foolish old men playing with forces beyond their reckoning. Beyond any mortal's reckoning, except, barely perhaps, the pure heart of a child. They had created him to solve their problems and cause them. His destiny had been woven at their hands.   
  
Plick, pluck.   
  
Five little almost lives, flickering out one by one until there was only one. No matter how many viable, no matter how far they temptingly progressed, only he always survived.   
  
He was snarled in their threads and _her_ threads, and really his path was set whatever he did now. Fighting only made things worse. Tangled the pattern and made it ugly. Not that it wasn’t ugly to begin with:   
  
Something plaid and yellow knit together by amateurs. One day — a day he could not choose, a day which would definitely occur — he would wear that weave made corporeal in a blinding coat, and only he would be awake to the irony.   
  
Though he wouldn’t understand then.   
  
Because he would forget all this.   
  
That was the deal. The one he had no choice in; the one where he would live to strangle his friends — and worse, but perhaps also save them in the same day   
  
Blurred vision. Uncertainty. Fear.  
  
No choice.   
  
_She_ had called him brave.   
  
Still, there were options.  
  
Later that day he stomped on an ant to see how it felt and cried when the little legs stopped moving. Stones fell, galaxies burned, death and dust hummed a duet, and much as the boy tried, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn’t put the ant back together again.  
  
He wasn't even sure what that meant. 


	16. What Child is This?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You can tell I wrote this during the festive season because the religious imagery just kept taking over and then, once it was firmly in place, the carols started inserting themselves...

  
Her name was a corruption of Mary, but there were many Marys in the gospel she knew, and she often wondered which she would be compared with: the blessed or the whore?  
  
She didn't remember lying sinfully with any man, but wondered if she had been bewitched by a devil. She never suspected the stranger — that would come much later, with tears, and accusations, and the answer to her question.   
  
"Please…" _I am a good woman._ "Please…" _I have always abided by the Law._ "Please…"  
  
"I am not a witch. I am not a prostitute. I didn't cast any spells."  
  
"Please…"  
  
"I am only a simple woman. Why choose me?"   
  
_And an Angel of the Lord's came unto her saying: Do not fear_   
  
Sometimes she dreamed of the stars; seeing them as furnaces instead of dots. They danced and leapt like sea foam (she had never seen the sea, never travelled more than three miles from her home village). They, the heavens, danced into her, once, before all the trouble with her growing belly — though her life had been trouble enough before then:   
  
"Please..."   
  
"I never poisoned nobody. These herbs are for healing not hurting."   
  
— they exploded against her like breakers greeting the coast at journey's end. All fury and life and nature: Unstoppable by its own will; let alone hers. She didn't want it to stop.  
  
Was that a sin?  
  
Sometimes she imagined her child was born of a coupling between herself and those dancing stars (or waves? it all became very confusing) — but that thought stung like salt in a wound, like blasphemy or insanity. Like the swelling that grew more apparent day by day (What was this? She was far too old, and barren all her life...).  
  
Better to confess union with the devil than with an angel.  
  
Better to be thought evil, and confess, than have the presumption of comparing yourself to —  
  
Some sins were more unforgivable than others.  
  
The pilgrim died (he did, if you dear reader had any doubts — here is his corpse, saved by the superstitious). No one knew his name, and he died, or his body died, a million, billion miles from home. His bones were dried and kept as relics by the local church; for many had seen the miracle of John Tall's healing. For generations after that (until the church burned and the bones with it) it was said that the Pilgrim's remains, held and meditated on, or powdered and drunk, could heal a person of any ill. A parting gift from the man/ angel/ saint? who had, for a time, walked among them.   
  
Maggie gave birth on the dirt floor of John's hovel with his eyes, and four other tiny pairs of eyes, watching. No mid-wife. Little children. Little man. Little woman straining naked with dirt and blood, and sweat and shame (though the birth was strangely painless and short). All of them so young in the eyes of He Who Watches Over Us. Of course, even the Pilgrim would have been young in His eyes.  
  
Even Time was young to Him.  
  
Baby Luke understood. Though he soon forgot, and grew older, and duller. He worked his back bent and died young — carried off by blisters and boils and pestilence. Though that is another story. However, I will say that, though Luke's life was not easy — none were in that age —, it was not without joy to balance the despair, and he found happiness and hope. And sometimes, in his deepest dreams, _he remembered_.  
  
Maggie's son was given in oblation to a monastery (She loved him, but could not feed him. Neither could John Tall who would have had he not four young ones already and a constantly empty pot. Maggie thought; "he was a gift from God, and in God's service he will be safely kept."). She ended up marrying John, widow and widower. They made a wholesome match: she gained some respect in the community and he lost some, but the legacy of the Pilgrim smoothed the way. Another gift.  
  
Maggie still dreamed of stars sometimes, though always less distinct. Sometimes she woke up sobbing into the dirt floor turned muddy and wondered if she had been wrong. Generally she was of good cheer:  
  
Such a strange way her angel had found to grant her forgiveness.  
  
Her child eventually ran away from the monastery, though what happened to him after that is unknown. It is assumed that he died along the road somewhere, but perhaps he found a place in the world. He was ever a strange child, telling stories, and needing much discipline from his keepers.  
  
He was also very clever, especially in the forge. Given a place to work he might have made his way as a smithy.  
  
His name was John — after the only man Maggie could claim as his father.   
  
He might have lived.   
  
Maybe.   
  
But he will vanish if you look. Anomalies always do.


	17. Face the Music

  
**_Gallimaufrey_**   
  
_Def —_  
  
1\. A hodgepodge; a jumble; a confused medley   
  


*

  
  
**_Gallifrey_**  
  
 _Def —  
  
1\. The home planet (up for debate, see appendix 3.432b) of the Time Lords. A Civilization founded by Rassilon the Great (See entry under _Historical Despots_ in the Guide)   
  
2\. A dead planet orbiting a dead sun. A living world held in balance by a carefully threaded paradox, a needle's point away from the destruction. A hodgepodge; a jumble; a confused medley stringing itself outwards across space and time.   
  
3\. Any place, object or person(s) which vanish under strange circumstances, ex: The ship, in a Gallifrey show, sank into the whirlpool, never to be seen again... _   
  
\- Taken from _The Hitchhiker's Backwards Dictionary to the Galaxy_   
  
  
  
  
He could see everything.   
  
  
  
  
He tried to run away. There was a certain old monk living in hermitage under a tree near his cousin's house. Foolishly the boy had though the old man could/ would hide him.   
  
The boy had trekked up the mountain to the monk's home burdened by his impossible future and a past that spread like a spider's web; sticky, tangled, and trying to capture him. The sky pressed down black as forever, and the ever-present stars — juxtaposed against the red, red sun — were sharp and laughing. Little knives of brightness stabbing and clawing at his back.   
  
The ground was cold with the season. The air formed icy sculptures when he breathed. His fingers — ungloved in his haste to leave — were turning purple. The top of the mountain seemed so very far away.   
  
  
It was his birthday.   
  
  
  
  
He could see everything and it hurt. Everything rushing against him; a tornado beating against his mind offering so much, and peeling away so much, and leaving him crumpled in its wake.   
  
He remembered sneaking out of the citadel in a future that hadn't happened yet (or had it? Everything was so confusing, everything was blowing about his mind, nothing tied down, nothing sacred...).   
  
He remembered dust and wind, and a great emptiness where he was sure there should be answers.   
  
Then a phoenix bit him, and there were new wonders to see.   
  
Time had so many colours: red, blue, green, indigo, amber, gold, heliotrope, onyx… it was a kaleidoscope, and just the colours, the endless palate of artistic possibilities was enough to lose himself in. But it didn't stop at the visual: it went on, and on, engaging every sense he never knew he had:   
  
Smell.   
  
There was death and decay and a new flower growing out of a battlefield. Red against mud. Colour, scent…   
  
Touch   
  
His fingers were still numb with cold. They had been numb before; once, in the bloodless dark when he opened a package to find a key. Would that happen again? Would it happen that way?   
  
Sound   
  
Larks flew, drums pounded… always the drum. The most primitive of instrument, made by every young sentient race in one form or another: The sound of them pounded across the cosmos: life, rhythm, sex, hope, dreams, death, power, hope, despair…   
  
  
_I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum…_   
  
  
  
  
The monk held a flower gently squeezed between two fingers; holding it with the same firm pressure the boy had used to grind an ant into the dirt. The flower was a paradox: frost blackened its petals, the season was too far progressed. It was a miracle it had grown amid the drifts and frost-cracked rocks:   
  
Now its life was ended in a moment as an example.   
  
Beauty, death, and a strange knowing smile. The boy left more confused than he had arrived. He was captured by his cousins on the way down the hill.   
  
  
  
  
_I played my drum for you, pa rum pum pum pum…_   
  
  
  
  
The vortex yawned. A vast and timeless maw that could swallow him so very easily; fanged, and dripping, with a lashing tongue that could crush his tiny existence, drown it, chew it up into nothing... It was terrible, and he could not look away.   
  
His cousin had a hand on his shoulder that was supposed to be reassuring, but the contact burned. The boy did not want pity comfort. He didn't want this vision that was reaching tendrils into his mind to consume him. He most of all didn't want the little voice that sang at the back of his consciousness:   
  
_Brave heart, my son._   
  
His cousins had dragged him here. Each footfall sent up clouds of invisible noxious dust as they pulled him down the bent-back passages, the twisting corridors he had never/always walked; These eternal arched umber halls where the snake ate its own head and the floor was patterned in geometric trapezoids.   
  
Bent heads shuffled beside them. Students. Lost souls sloughing through the dust. Grey. Everything was grey, and then they, his wicked cousins, and the Headmaster, the President (stop slouching boy! Stand up straight! Do your House proud!), and a man with a sloping brow and devious eye, deposited him in front of the Untempered Schism. To tremble.   
  
_"Do you remember your choice?"_  
  
"What choice? I had no choice?"   
  
"You had many choices, but only one was apparent to you. That does not mean there were not others."   
  
"You lied. You said I would forget."   
  
"You will."   
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  
The boy quivered — that was normal — but he did not blink or turn away. The schism swirled before him, and the colours seemed brighter, the drum-roll louder… The man with the sloped brow wondered at the wisdom of this child.   
  
Readings had shown their experiments to be a success. The selected planet would have a near 100% saturation of the Gallifreyan genome by its 28th century (local calendar). There was no need to further seed the world. No need for this hybrid to be shuffled through the programme. No need for it to even exist.   
  
They should kill it, and rid themselves of the evidence. Its continued existence was a risk. If anyone noticed the paradox and then made a close examination all of their hard work could be undone, and the future of their entire race would be placed in jeopardy.   
  
The man would not allow that.   
  
He had gazed into the looking glass with the rest of his order; done the forbidden and pierced the veil into their own future. What they had seen had terrified them.   
  
Nothing.   
  
The planet burned and gone. Their race extinct. Never existed.   
  
Impossible.   
  
They searched, tried to find the source of this die-off and could not. Tried a dozen solutions: send colonists to other planets, Gallifrey might burn but the colonies will survive.   
  
Except they didn't.   
  
Look in the future again and again and see nothing. Time laughed. The dust laughed. And thirteen men, the hidden council of the CIA swore, and cursed, and ripped the fabric of forever apart trying to find a timeline in which they were preserved.   
  
They wounded Time in ways they could never understand. Stabbed and slashed her. Left her weak and bleeding.   
  
They did not care.   
  
They found a race that never died off in any time line. A strong, sturdy species that would live until the end of this universe, and then transcend it into the mystery of the next. They began a program to seed that race, so that — when the transcendence occurred, when the temporal winds at the end of forever buffeted this undying race forward into eternity — these _humans_ would carry the blue prints of the Time Lords onwards into a new universe, and Gallifrey would never die.   
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  
The man with the sloped brow suddenly leaped forward and pushed the boy out of his cousin's grip and into to vortex. For a moment, a pure, lasting moment, untainted by dust or destiny, the boy, unbound from himself, rode the currents of time.   
  
_What do you choose?_   
  
He could feel himself splitting. His path was set. He would be the destroyer of worlds, but still Time and her sisters gave him free will. So kind. So cruel.   
  
_You have no choice over your actions, but you can control your own mind. Will you enjoy the carnage or rebel against it? Will you choose pain or power? Love or happiness?_   
  
_Which price would you rather pay: madness, or sanity through your task?_   
  
"I can't."   
  
  
  
  
Silence. Peace. A pressure on his arm as his cousin sprung forward and pulled him back from the brink.   
  
Shouting. Confusion.   
  
The Citidel guards had their weapons pulled on the stranger; the man with the sloping brow. The President was yelling. The Headmaster was murmuring something comforting into the boy's ear. The boy couldn't stand it. Someone was laughing at him. Another boy, standing beside him with glazed eyes. The rhythm of that other boy's hearts pounded along with the vortex and the dust and the drums.   
  
  
_pa rum pum pum pum…_   
  
  
The boys, twins, regarded each other for a moment.   
  
One ran, and one stayed.   
  
And the decision was ratified.   
  
  
  
  
No turning back.


	18. Somnambulist No More

  
  
Once, there was a boy. He wandered endless corridors. He attended school and understood what he learned even if he was rubbish at tests. He was rubbish at friendships too, and though he made many, none lasted.   
  
It was because of his wandering nature. He could never keep his mind firmly in one place long enough to listen to another person — and listening is the keystone of friendship. He always seemed a bit _off_ , distant… His eyes drifted away from conversations and over heads to stare at unseen ideas. Sometimes he muttered about things that weren't there, or hadn't happened yet, and those around him would back away slowly.   
  
Leave him be. It might rub off.   
  
We respect you; we just don't want to be seen with you.   
  
He graduated with a very advanced degree in temporal science. He failed his exam, passing it by only the barest of margins on the second go; but, given the difficulty of the course, that was to be expected. He had a very bright future ahead of him. Everyone said so. There were whispers that he might make a run at the Presidency one day…   
  
  
  
  
Once, there was a boy. He had sleepwalked for an eternity. He had lived a thousand different lives and been a thousand different people, but, finally, he was ready to be himself. He went to bed in an Academy rejuvenation chamber (his people did not sleep often enough for the school to be fitted with separate dorms). He was no longer a student; he was an intern-assistant-professor, a rare and elated position for a recent graduate.   
  
Really he was a man by this point; He was treated as a man, he looked like a man, but he felt like a boy. He felt unsatisfied, uncompleted...   
  
He went to bed to dream, to look at the world through a babe's blue eyes and _remember_.   
  
When he awoke he left the Academy. He walked through the endless corridors one last time and found the exit. He did not stare at the floor and its shifting illusions as he moved (stay here, you have a good life this time, _stay.._ ), but kept his eyes front, on the goal, on the memory that led him.   
  
The red bird cooed, and flapped a wing, and he had to run to keep up, tripping over the tangles of the weave. It wanted to snare him, but he wouldn't let it, not again, never again...   
  
His flight left him breathless.   
  
He felt like a boy, but his body was old, and his bones creaked as he chased the bird, the dream, the compass point; Down stairs, up stairs, along sterile white halls that all looked the same, twists, bends, and cul-de-sacs — until he came to a familiar door.   
  
A dusty chair sat beside it. Unused for centuries. It was a good place to rest for a moment before proceeding, and his weary frame fitted its indentation perfectly.   
  
  
  
  
Once, there was a boy. He was born on Earth during the early 1800s. He had dreams that he could not comprehend (leftovers from his dead dreamer father, said his mother, the man had been a menace, lost in fantasy and unable to cope with life. _"Watch that you don't follow down that same path"_ ). Following it (and his dreams) the boy built a ship that travelled through space and time. It was crude — he had not the materials to match the vision of the slick imaginations which haunted his mind, but it worked (once, but that was all that was needed).   
  
It carried him to a dusty planet a galaxy away from his home (that had never really seemed home-like). A cold, dry world with auburn plains, silver trees, and a glowing sky that showed stars at noon (when they weren't obscured by clouds in rose, amber, and crimson). A world just starting out, inhabited by angry children who barely understood fire.   
  
He taught them.   
  
His name is lost to time, obscured, like the stars, by the names of his pupils. A great civilization was his legacy, and his curse.   
  
He created himself.   
  
  
  
  
Once, there was a boy. He stumbled through a scrap room in the dark, searching… His red bird hovered before him, and, though the light it gave off was not real, it provided illumination enough. It let the boy avoid the hazards scattered across the floor; The sharp points so eager to draw and drink his blood; To snare him, and keep him in limbo a little while longer.   
  
The bird led him to a row of rusty capsules lined against the climax wall. Order at last in the chaos.   
  
It — instinct, dreams, past lives, _he'd done this before_ — raised the boy's hand to caress the one capsule that would open for him; the one that would carry him away and assuage his curiosity at last; the one that would be his friend and jailer. The one out of the many that would — this time — lead him to freedom, and destiny, and all of the choices that he had already made.   
  
The key was already in the lock. He had only to turn it.   
  
  
  
  
Once, there was a boy. Only he was no longer a boy. Now, finally, he was a man. He stumbled out of a sedan chair (a cunning disguise) and onto a planet which he had many times (never) visited before. He stumbled down the streets, taking in the sites, and ran into an orphan girl who was —   
  
A difficult question to answer:   
  
He was an ancestor to her, and her entire race, many times removed. He had cradled them from inception, though, strictly speaking, it had never truly been _him_. They were related, somehow, but it was a far cry and she shouldn't have sensed it.   
  
She was like a butterfly compared to him. Fleeting, bright, so easily hurt.   
  
She called him grandfather and that seemed right. Time smiled and made it so.   
  
  
  
  
Once, there was a boy. He stood at the centre of time and watched the universe turn. He was a pawn, a puppet of higher powers. He was a sleeper, an ace up someone's sleeve, a last resort in times of greatest need.   
  
He was also a person who deserved a chance to be a person, and full of reckless audacity (she liked that). She gave him a task and set him free. He travelled in her, and lived in her, and saved creation with her. She couldn't save him from his fate, but she could love him.   
  
Her champion. Her knight in shining armour. Awake at last.   
  



End file.
